Changing the name and focus of this group from WebAssembly and binary code to WebCore etc and source code.

I would like to make the case to the members to consider changing the
focus of this group from the development of a binary code to a source
code with a binary encoding. The difference might not sound significant
at first but it might make a significant difference to the intent of
code deployed to the web in binary format.

In the current case source code is 'compiled' or 'assembled' into the
binary format and deployed in binary format. With this focus the
developers might be tempted to abandon any claim to the binary encoding
being related to the source, and for example move to a linear virtual
machine code without expressions or structured flow control etc.

While it might be possible to 'view-source' the deployed code it might
be consider 'disassembly' or 'reverse engineering' which are very loaded
terms for IP.

I believe that although the operators being developed are primitive and
close to the hardware, that these can still be used in a structured
source code with expressions and local variables etc to make the code
more readable and easier to write. A binary encoding would still be
developed that would be a one-to-one reversible encoding of the source
(basically a lossless compression of the source). I believe this could
still be a good target for the use case of a compilation target which
seems to be the current focus.

I have been working away at trying to use type derivation to help
eliminate bounds checking, and there has been another recent proposal by
sunfish to use some loop analysis to help eliminate bounds checks too,
and while I don't have anything concrete I suspect this will be much
easier to define in structured code. For example, a common case is to
define a local constant variable with a typed that can be derived such
as masking a value or asserting its bounds.

The new name would remove 'Assembly' and make it clear this is a source
code although primitive. For example WebCore if it is not taken. The
Specification language would change it's emphasis to being a source
code, while still supporting the use case of being a compilation target.

Would there be any support for such a re-focusing of the group, or are
the majority of people wanting a web machine code binary format to
compile to?

Regards
Douglas Crosher

Received on Thursday, 26 November 2015 13:57:49 UTC